Rise Up

Things were looking dire on Tuesday morning at Sotheby's during the Chinese fine art auction. A battered troop of about thirty art handlers—accompanied again by the inflatable fat cat crushing a union worker—marched a long semi-circle inside the partitioned protest zone, chanting “No contract, no work, no peace.”

It’s been eight months since these 43 hardworking men and women were put out of their jobs for demanding fair pay and benefits. AFC thinks that’s more than enough. Let’s fix this.

Back in 1995, Brian Eno’s opening speech at Turner Prize award ceremony caused all kinds of clamor. The speech lampooned the arts community for its lack of intellectual rigor, comparing the openness and public knowledge of scientific debates with the often-impenetrable discourse around art.

Eno, in his diary, recounts that at the ceremony, “various people looked at me like I was Satan, or with obvious pity.” The next day, he notes that he was stopped in the street and congratulated. When read today, however, the words sound as fresh and exciting as ever, and demand everything I often feel the fine art world lacks. As such, I’m reproducing the text in its entirety for readers below.

This morning, Artinfo reports two protests staged against the Whitney Biennial, which opens to the public on Thursday. Firstly, the OWS Arts and Labor group has sent a letter calling for the end of the Biennial in 2014, indicating that it “upholds a system that benefits collectors, trustees, and corporations at the expense of art workers.” Then a credible press release was sent out under the museum’s name and logo, announcing a break with two of its sponsors — Sotheby’s and Deutsche Bank — the morning of the press preview.

Artist Petra Cortright has had one of her early webcam videos pulled from youtube because she tagged the piece with key words such as tits and vagina. Rhizome reports they’ve snagged in their archive; good preservation news for the art folk. They’ve even gone so far as to replicate all the original tags, so props to them for due diligence.

More from the Keith Haring Journals. Just for starters, “I can't believe that some people are so shallow as to worry about whether one person, like Saatchi, collects me or not,” says Haring. “How can one person be an important determiner of what is good or not? In fact, if someone is trying to use their power or collecting to impose their taste and standardize the taste of the entire culture, then I think they are the most suspicious suspects of all.”

I’ve never cared much for the work of Keith Haring, so perhaps its fitting that the artist whose work most resembles that made by a robot worried about a computer takeover. An excerpt from the Keith Haring Journals after the jump.

Mining AFC’s library has once again proved fruitful. In this week’s selection of quotes by art world types, the book “Between Artists” yields some great thoughts on revolution and the can in a 1993 interview between Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Tim Rollins.